Original subtitles

Warships are the ultimate symbol

of a nation's military might.

These things are monstrous wonders of technology.

Enormous vessels, crewed by thousands,

bristling with massive guns and powerful aircraft,

they can deliver terrifying destruction

and turn the tide of history.

The ship was built to win the war.

There was no other reason.

From the beginning of the 20th century

to the present day,

these are the stories of classic warships.

From dreadnoughts to Bismarck,

to Japan's monster sea warrior Yamato,

the American super ships, Wisconsin,

Lexington, and Enterprise,

to today's cutting edge Royal Navy carriers,

these are the world's greatest warships.

Halfway through World War I, over 200 warships clashed

in the era's defining naval battle,

the Battle of Jutland.

Over 25 ships and thousands of men were sent to the bottom.

The loss was a shock, but there was also success.

On both sides a new type of ship

had dished out massive damage and taken many huge hits,

yet remained afloat, able to return to base for repair.

These were the war machines

that sparked the arms race that changed the world.

It was a menacing, dangerous-looking ship,

and everybody wanted one.

These were the dreadnoughts,

but they only came about because of a book.

In 1890, an American naval officer

called Alfred Thayer Mahan published a detailed

study of British naval strategy.

Mahan's book on "The Influence of Sea power on History"

was a painstaking analysis, in effect,

of how Britain came to be so big in the world.

Andrew Gordon is a naval historian.

Mahan's book explained something

nobody had worried their heads about.

How could it happen that this little rainy country

off the northwest of Europe had this huge global presence?

And the answer, of course, was sea power.

It had been 90 years

since Nelson's decisive victory at Trafalgar

and Britain was the most powerful nation in the world.

Its sea lanes policed by a Royal Navy

that dwarfed its rivals, rivals who'd had enough

of playing second fiddle.

Britain was looked at by other nations

with a mixture of envy and admiration,

especially on the German side.

Jann Witt teaches

early 20th century German history.

Germany was fully industrialized

and was a blooming economy.

Nevertheless, at that point of time in military

and strategic terms, it was still a Continental power.

Germany's ambitious emperor

Kaiser Wilhelm II was a big fan of Mahan's book.

The main argument of Mahan was

if you want to be a world power, you'll need a strong navy.

So this was the ideology the Kaiser embraced

to make Germany by this a world power.

Germany quickly started to build

a powerful new fleet to rival a Royal Navy

that was becoming increasingly bloated.

On paper, the fleet is unquestionably

the mightiest navy in the world, but if you look closely,

there were a vast number of ships

that were no longer fit for purpose.

Andrew Choong is one of the curators

at the Royal Museums in Greenwich.

The problem was that in any kind of shooting war,

while they were perfectly good for imperial policing,

they would struggle to survive against the more modern ships

that were being deployed by smaller navies.

The German buildup focused British minds

on the need to modernize.

And in 1904, the Royal Navy appointed a radical new leader.

The very colorful Admiral Jackie Fisher

becomes the First Sea Lord.

And effectively the Royal Navy is his.

Within certain limits, he can stamp his style on it,

do what he wants with it,

and he already has in his mind this concept

of the super battleship of the future.

This ship embodies two very important elements.

One is very, very high speed.

Fisher was all about having tactical superiority

by being able to run rings around the opposition.

The other is superior firepower, vastly superior firepower.

Fisher's problem was that his concept

was based on theories rather than experience.

He needed facts to back up his ideas.

What Jackie Fisher needed was a war.

Since 1903, Japan and Russia had been at war

on land and sea over who controlled

large parts of Southeast Asia.

The defining moment came in 1905

with a naval battle in the Straits of Tsushima.

The interesting thing about Tsushima

is it's the first battle to come for an awfully long time.

Nick Hewitt is head of exhibitions

at the National Museum of the Royal Navy.

You have to go back nearly 100 years really

to find the last big fleet action that anybody takes.

And you notice, if you look at the Napoleonic Wars,

battles fought between ships powered by sail power,

made of wood firing muzzle-loading cannons.

Fast forward a 100 years and you've got steel battleships

with rifled guns in revolving turrets,

powered by steam engines.

And nobody has tried this technology out.

It's never really been used in action before.

Now this was a very, very mismatched conflict.

Russia was an established European power,

and although Japan had modernized to an incredible degree

in the last few decades, no one really thought

that an Asian upstart would be able to challenge

this European giant.

The experts were wrong.

Japan's navy had fast, modern ships,

equipped with powerful 12 inch guns

and Royal Navy-trained crews.

Russia's was dated and Ill-prepared.

During the battle,

the Japanese ships outmaneuvered the Russians.

Their guns were more accurate

and effective at a greater range

The results were devastating.

It was a total wipe out of the Russian fleet.

49 out of 52 Russian ships

were sunk or captured.

This decisive victory won Japan the war.

Tsushima is an earthquake.

It's an absolute culture shock to the great powers.

The upstart has won and the upstart has won

because they possess the superior battle fleet.

The message was modernize, modernize or die.

As the 20th century began,

Britain's status as the world's greatest sea power

was under threat.

The navy's fleet was becoming dated.

And Germany was building up

an evermore ominous collection of warships.

But new naval supremo Jackie Fisher believed he had an idea

that would keep Britain's command of the seas intact.

Now, Japan's decisive victory

at the Battle of Tsushima had delivered proof

that his concept for a world-beating warship

was on the right track.

He wanted a ship with big punch, that was fast,

and that could keep out of the range of enemy gunfire.

And that ship was called Dreadnought.

Jackie Fisher planned to create

the world's first al-big-gun battleship.

An unprecedented 10 12 inch guns in five turrets

would deliver accurate and deadly fire over a huge range.

The latest engines would give smoother, more reliable power,

allowing her to outpace her rivals and dictate the battle.

A belt of face-hardened armor would protect

her main control rooms, turrets, and magazines,

completing the formidable package

that would make HMS Dreadnought

the most powerful warship ever built.

As if that wasn't enough,

Fisher wanted the launch of his new ship

to take his rivals by surprise.

Fisher had set a target of wanting the ship

completed within a year, which was unheard of.

Battleships were normally completed

within two to three years from the laying of the keel.

So this was a supreme effort and he wanted this

to be done quietly because he wanted the ship

to have all the more impact when it was finally launched.

So Dreadnought is built in less than a year.

She's in part built in less than a year

because Fisher takes them clever tricks.

He prefabricates steel and has it piled upon the dock side.

He orders as many parts in advance as he can

and only then presses the go button on building the ship.

One of the great problems when you're building a ship

in this period is that the guns and the turrets

take almost longer to manufacture than the ship itself.

Luckily for Fisher,

two large battleships were being constructed

for the Royal Navy at the same time as Dreadnought.

And their turrets and the gun calibers

were exactly what he wanted.

So these four turrets were reallocated to Dreadnought,

which meant that she could be completed on schedule.

The unveiling of Fisher's vision for a new era

of British naval supremacy arrived in 1906,

when King Edward VII launched HMS Dreadnought

at Portsmouth Naval Dockyard.

Predictably, it was her all-big-gun layout

that impressed witnesses the most.

A ship, apparently invincible,

and capable of one discharge from her guns,

of throwing with unparalleled force,

twice as much metal as any foreign man of war now afloat,

and three times as much as most.

Neither Dreadnought or any other battleship

of her day still exist, except one.

Commissioned in 1914,

USS Texas stands alone as a unique testament

to First World War battleship technology.

With her all-big-gun layout still fully intact,

she's able to conjure a sense of what operating

her fearsome artillery was like.

Andy Smith is the ship's manager.

So we're down in the belly of the ship,

about six stories down from the top of the turret.

This whole mechanism is attached to that turret

and would move with the turret.

And we're in the magazine,

so this is where the shells are stored.

So ultimately the shells are stored in here.

They're attached to this monorail system,

brought through here.

They hooked up to this hoist and then attached.

And when it's ready to go up, boom, ring this bell.

And then they're cranked up

all the way to that turret eventually.

So we're inside turret number one.

These are the rifles.

This is the whole reason why the battleship's float,

to have these rifles available.

So ultimately you'd have a round, about 1,500 pounds,

coming all the way from the very bottom of the ship.

Comes up this elevator, right there,

rolls over, then it gets rammed in here.

And then you got four more bags,

four bags of powder that come up,

get put in behind that, rammed in.

They strap themselves in,

they go ahead with this talking tube, "Guns ready to fire".

They're strapped up against the wall here,

out of the way of this breach, waiting.

They pull the trigger.

This shell traveling up to 12 miles, and then when it hits,

creating a hole the size of a basketball court.

Of course, the awesome power

of all those 14 inch shells was only an advantage

if they hit their targets.

Again, Fisher had thought this through.

The idea to use a single caliber main armament

solved a problem that had long prevented guns

from being used accurately at long range.

Before Dreadnought, ships generally fired an array

of different calibers at the same target,

which meant gunnery officers

often struggled to gauge ranges.

You can't correct if you have three different calibers

of guns banging away independently

because nobody knows whose shell splash is whose.

And that's what was keeping the ranges in close.

To increase the effective range

of its massive guns, HMS Dreadnought was the first ship

with a purpose-built fire control platform.

This area is the lookout and more importantly

the fire control position.

So the gunnery officer would be based up here,

directing the fire of the entire main armament of the ship.

This was a very, very new system for the Royal Navy.

They were still evolving this when Dreadnought

was built and commissioned.

By organizing the guns to fire with one man,

the gunnery officer, in the spotting top

who is observing the fall of shot

and is pressing the button to fire salvos.

And so get a group of shells landing together

and you can tell, if you are the gunnery officer

in the foretop, if the shells are landing short

or over and you can correct.

To ram home their advantage,

these powerful and now accurate guns

needed to be brought to bear on their targets quickly

and from the best angles.

This meant Dreadnought needed to be faster

than all of her rivals.

Until now all large warships

had used huge triple expansion steam engines

with massive pistons driving crankshafts.

But pushing these hard caused damaging vibrations.

Once again, Jackie Fisher opted for the cutting-edge

in technology, steam turbine engines.

Putting turbines into a large untested battleship

was a very, very brave move.

The technology had been proven

but not in a ship of this scale.

Turbines are quieter, they're faster,

they're more efficient, they are less prone to breakdowns.

Dreadnought could be run at her maximum speed

of almost 20 knots for sustained periods.

And what this meant in practice

was that she could outrun any pre-dreadnought in existence.

To tie together the advantages

of high speed and devastating firepower,

HMS Dreadnought was also equipped

with the very latest technology in electrical power systems,

similar to ones still on USS Texas today.

So this is your power distribution for the whole ship.

This is as much a cutting-edge technology as those big guns,

as that big armor we have, as those turbine engines

that are pushing these dreadnoughts.

This is the cutting-edge.

If you think about the average sailor that came aboard,

he probably didn't have electricity in his home

and now he's coming aboard and everything's lit

with fans and blowers.

I mean, people would die in these ships, they'd get so hot.

You need air movement, you need lights.

All of those little things that make it all work,

those hoists to get the the shells up

to the top of the turret, they're running off electricity.

Where's that electricity coming from?

It's coming from in here.

And so all of these switches are basically turning off

and on power to various parts of the ship

and redirecting it where needed.

You imagine if a part of the ship

is underwater, is being flooded because it was hit,

you don't want electricity running through that.

So they would shut the power down to that part of the ship,

redirect it somewhere else.

So you're dealing with high, high voltage.

There's a lot of power coursing through here.

And it wouldn't come as a surprise

if when you did this there'd be a little pushback.

These guys down here were probably some

of the bravest guys on board the ship.

This is not for the faint of heart for sure.

The really big shock had been caused

by HMS Dreadnought herself.

No ship had ever combined size, speed,

power, and armor in such a fearsome machine.

Dreadnought, something that fears nothing.

It can project power, it can secure sea lanes,

it can defend a coast, it can attack a coast.

It can dominate the seas.

HMS Dreadnought is a real game changer.

The old vessels, the old pre-dreadnought,

as they're called now, battleships, are simply outclassed.

The creation of HMS Dreadnought

was a great triumph for Fisher,

but he also had created an enormous problem

for himself and for the Royal Navy.

It made every other battleship in the world obsolete,

including all of Britain's.

Fisher is essentially pressing the reset button

on the global arms race.

The German admiralty simply saw itself forced

to build vessels like HMS Dreadnought.

It was an arms race like we saw post-World War II

between the Soviet Union and U.S...

In the '50s it was nukes, in the teens, it was dreadnoughts.

The U.S., France, and Japan

all set about making their versions of HMS Dreadnought.

But it was Germany's response that worried the Royal Navy.

It took the Germans a couple of years,

but they succeeded in quickly designing

and launching their own dreadnoughts.

Author Mark Stille specializes

in the battleships of the 20th century.

The German ships were a bit different

than the British designs because they emphasized

protection at the expense of fire power.

So they were not as heavily armed

as most British ships were of the day.

By 1911, the Germans are producing designs

that match Britain in quality.

And in the years after that, if anything,

some of their designs are beginning to pull ahead.

By 1914, Germany had truly come of age

as a warship builder.

Perhaps the best example was the Konig-class battleship.

Four were built, including SMS Konig herself.

So we are looking here at a magnificent plan

of the Konig-class.

It's very well designed in regard of protection.

So you see here a heavy deck armor.

You see here a massive side armor.

You see here the double bottom.

In case of a mine hit, there's a great chance

that the vessel will only be lightly damaged.

And you see a huge number of bulkheads,

which divides the vessel in watertight compartments.

You see here also the number of guns listed.

10 3.5 or 12 inch main guns in five turrets.

14 15 centimeter guns.

Also 10 8.8 centimeter guns for fighting off torpedo boats.

They were quick firing or quick loading guns, of course.

Five torpedo tubes underwater,

one in the bow and four on the broad sides.

So yeah, she was really a vessel to reckoned with in battle.

As Germany's navy grew,

the likelihood of war loomed ever larger.

Formidable new ships such as Konig were intended

to present an unacceptable risk to Britain's interests.

The idea was it should be powerful enough

to cause the Royal Navy sufficient casualties,

that even if the German fleet lost

Britain's possessions would be vulnerable to other powers.

Therefore, the Royal Navy would not want to challenge

the German fleet for that reason.

It would stop Britain declaring war on Germany.

Well, it didn't work, did it?

In 1906, HMS Dreadnought had fired

the starting pistol on the all-big-gun battleship arms race.

Britain, France, the United States, Russia, Japan,

and Germany had all battled fiercely to build the biggest,

baddest gunship the world had ever seen.

By 1914, so fast was the pace of change

that the original HMS Dreadnought

was already past her sell by date.

I always find it quite amusing

that we look at technological development now

and we get excited if there's a new smartphone comes out.

But actually in that eight year period,

these things changed beyond recognition,

to the point where HMS Dreadnought

is obsolete by the start of the First World War.

HMS Dreadnought may have been relegated

to minor fleet duties, but so indelible was her legacy

that all big battleships became known as dreadnoughts.

With excellent dreadnoughts like the Konig

Germany had caught up with Britain in quality,

but the one thing they were never able

to match was quantity.

Britain has the advantage if you compare, for example,

with Germany, Germany is also trying to build

the world's largest army at the same time,

and they simply cannot keep up with the British

who are really 100% focused on naval building.

They're building these things almost

at the rate of a class of four every year gets ordered

and laid down and they're getting progressively

bigger and bigger.

In Britain, the Navy was the senior service.

While in Germany, although she had this ambition

to become a world power, still was a Continental power.

So she needed a strong army.

And so the bulk of the money spend for military

was spent for the army.

And this also kind of hindered, of course,

a massive buildup of the fleet.

In August, 1914, that powerful German army

invaded Belgium, a British ally, triggering World War I.

When war breaks out and the arms race

is brought to a sudden halt,

the British have 22 dreadnoughts in commission.

The German Navy is somewhat behind with 13.

To add to this, the British have nine battle cruisers

in commission to Germany's four.

So it looks like a substantial lead

in the Royal Navy's favor at the beginning of World War I.

From day one of the war,

the sheer number of their ships meant the Royal Navy

had the upper hand on Germany's High Seas Fleet.

The speed of modern warships meant

that the main Grand Fleet could lie secure in Scapa Flow,

its new base in Scotland.

With smaller fleets based in Rosyth,

Harwich, and on the South Coast,

Britain now had a very effective blockade

on Germany's small section of the North Sea coast.

The proud new ships of the Kaiser's fleet struggled

to operate beyond their own local waters.

It's probably fair to say that at the start

of the First World War,

the German High Seas Fleet did not know what to do.

Their planning had been based on an idea

that the Royal Navy would follow its traditional

aggressive approach and come stampeding

into the Southern North Sea to take them on

and annihilate them in a sort of Trafalgar II.

Both sides are waiting for this apocalyptic confrontation

between the two fleets.

And much to everyone's frustration, this doesn't happen.

The British didn't come,

so there was no decisive battle in the North Sea

as the Germans had expected.

So they had to build up, from scratch,

a new strategic approach.

So to break the deadlock,

the Germans formulate a plan whereby they will try

and entice a portion of the Grand Fleet out to engage them

and hopefully trap and sink this detached portion

with the entirety of the High Seas Fleet strength.

Once they have done this to the Royal Navy enough times,

they'll then be able to meet it on equal or superior terms

and win a decisive victory.

On May 31st, 1916, that exact plan was underway

as bold new German commander Admiral Scheer,

prepared to ambush a small fleet of Royal Navy warships.

His scouting fleet engaged

a British battle cruiser squadron.

Unlike dreadnought battleships,

battle cruisers were lightly armored for greater speed.

Initially, the German effort goes according to plan,

that the two battle cruiser forces meet and catastrophically

two British battle cruisers blow up and sink.

This is mainly because of the way in which they're storing

and using ammunition onboard the ships.

On the two battle cruisers

were 2,385 sailors, only 20 survived.

It was round one to Admiral Scheer.

Scheer now chased the small British fleet

towards the coast of Jutland,

where the rest of his High Seas Fleet lay in wait,

ready to pounce.

What he didn't know was that also lying in wait

was the entire British Grand Fleet.

In command was Admiral Jellicoe aboard his flagship

HMS Iron Duke, a bang up to date battleship

so advanced from the original HMS Dreadnought

that she was known as a super dreadnought.

Andrew Choong has an original

as completed plan of this powerful vessel.

If I lay these plans of HMS Iron Duke

over the ones of HMS Dreadnought,

it allows us to see the huge changes that have taken place.

This ship was built a mere seven

or eight years after Dreadnought.

General improvements resulted in ships that were larger,

faster, and much more powerful.

This ship is a quantum leap above its near ancestor

and the differences necessitated a much larger hull

to accommodate all the improvements.

So again, the most noticeable thing about this ship

is the primary armament,

the powerful main battery of 13.5 inch guns,

larger than those mounted aboard Dreadnought.

But most importantly gone are the wing turrets,

which we saw in Dreadnought.

Everything is on a center-line,

which means that when this ship engages an enemy vessel,

she can bring her entire armament to bear.

The key improvements to Iron Duke

were to her firepower.

Eight of her 13.5 inch guns

were now set in super firing pairs,

meaning four barrels could now aim directly fore or aft.

The middle turret was now centered,

able to aim across both flanks.

Secondary armament was beefed up with six inch guns

on each flank, plus smaller weapons to guard against

the threat of fast boat torpedo attack.

Bigger, faster, and smarter, the super dreadnoughts

were built to rule the waves of the North Sea.

In the churning seas off Jutland,

Iron Duke led 16 other super dreadnoughts

to create Admiral Jellicoe's formidable British battle line.

The German battle line led by Konig

was now unwittingly steaming straight towards them.

Perfectly positioned, Jellicoe gave the order to engage.

Iron Duke took aim at Konig and unleashed a salvo

of nine 13.5 inch shells.

In the next few minutes,

Konig was hit by seven of Iron Duke's shells,

other ships scored hits as well.

She received 10 heavy, five to six lighter hits,

with 45 of her crew dead and another 27 wounded,

but she still was afloat.

Iron Duke leads the attack on the German line

twice more that evening.

Her gunner's hitting Konig again and sinking a destroyer.

There's great loss on both sides.

Admiral Scheer comes to the conclusion

that this is not the sort of battle he wanted.

He didn't want an epic showdown

and his only thought is to disengage

and get his fleet back to safety

because a number of his ships are battered by now

and their combat effectiveness has been reduced,

so he needs to get them home,

he needs to get them home intact.

So the German fleet mostly got home,

and got home before our fleet got home

because it happened close to Denmark.

And the German fleet claimed to have been victorious.

One German newspaper even quoted the Kaiser

as saying "The myth of Trafalgar has been broken.

We've ended the blockade.

Germany has achieved its objective on the seas.

We hold the trident now, not Britain."

It was a claim that initially made sense.

Only two major German ships had been sunk

and their death toll was 2,551 men.

The British had come off far worse.

Over 6,000 souls had perished and six major ships sunk.

As the Grand Fleet struggled home,

the trauma of it all sank in.

Bert Stevens was a stoker on onboard HMS Chester.

When we come back,

come out of that scrap, we were terribly bashed about.

When we got about 100 miles from Grimsby,

Captain Lawson says, "I'm gonna stop the ship."

He said, "I'll have to take a chance.

We can't take these men in, they're too bad,"

And he stopped the ship and we buried

the worst ones over the side, see?

Had 'em in canvas and we put a damaged shell in,

over the side.

I forget how many we buried, I couldn't say.

I know it was a terrible thing.

The Royal Navy had suffered,

but once the smoke cleared,

the claims of a German victory rang hollow.

Jutland was what was known

as a fleet in being victory for the British.

Strategically, the battle changed nothing.

The British blockade was still in effect

and the German battle fleet was in no shape

to go to sea for a number of weeks.

It was a defeat

Because finally it was proven that the High Seas Fleet

could not end the war in favor of Germany.

There was one clear winner of this great battle.

It was the dreadnoughts themselves.

The interesting thing about Jutland is it shows

that the power of the defensive technology

that's been introduced with the the dreadnought

and then the super dreadnought battleship.

The British lose three battle cruisers,

the Germans lose an elderly pre-dreadnought battleship,

and a battle cruiser, not one dreadnought battleship

is sunk at Jutland.

I think this proves the quality of ship building,

of ship construction of these Dreadnought-class vessels

on both sides.

They really were formidable ships.

Jackie Fisher's vision of super warships

had demonstrated their awesome power,

but their influence on sea power

was perhaps not quite what he'd foreseen.

His dreadnoughts had been able to destroy everything

in their gun sights except each other.

But Fisher would've been happy

that the outcome favored Britain.

In the aftermath of Jutland,

the German surface navy was again confined to port.

A month after Jutland,

Admiral Scheer writes a confidential report to the Kaiser

in which he had admits as such.

He says that "One of the lessons

we've learned from this battle

is that we cannot defeat the Royal Navy at sea

in a Mahanian sense.

We cannot annihilate their battle fleet.

That's beyond our capability.

We have to think of something else."

From now on, German submarines attacked

commerce shipping in the Atlantic,

a tactic that eventually brought the U.S.A. into the war,

increased the allies' strength

and helped end the war itself.

But the peace was fragile

and there remained one massively powerful weapon

that needed to be handled very carefully,

the German dreadnought fleet.

The British don't fear the remains of the German Navy.

The biggest British fear is that smaller nations

will make a play for those battleships

and increase their own navies as a consequence.

And in particular, they're worried about France and Italy,

both of whom have said that they want

some of these German dreadnoughts.

So pretty much the top of the shopping list

for the British is to have the German Navy

handed over and interned.

The German fleet was disarmed.

The breaches of the guns were left in Wilhelmshaven

together with the ammunition.

So they were absolutely defenseless.

They had only a minimum of coal,

only a skeleton crew on board

and then steamed over the North Sea

to Scapa Flow to be in interned.

Konig was the final German battleship

to enter the Scottish naval base.

Here, this once mighty fleet awaited its fate.

But a secret plan meant the Germans

would take back control of their dreadnoughts.

In 1916, most of Britain's fleet of super dreadnoughts

had fought Germany's in the defining

naval battle of the war.

They hadn't won,

but more importantly proved they couldn't be beaten.

This played a key role in Germany's eventual defeat.

Seven months after the war,

the victorious allies met in Versailles

to decide how to punish Germany

and what to do with her vanquished

but still awesomely powerful fleet of dreadnoughts,

now anchored in Scapa Flow under Royal Navy guard.

In the summer of 1919,

a rumor spreads through the German fleet

that the war is going to start again.

And they're sitting there in the main British base

with no ammunition on their ships and virtually no crews.

But the one thing that they can choose to do

to make that gesture that they're still part of the war

is to scuttle their own ships.

And that's exactly what they do.

On the 21st of June, 1919,

almost the entire British guard fleet

left Scapa Flow on exercises.

The German commander's secret plan was put into action.

By a prearranged signal, they opened their seacocks

and the whole fleet started to sink.

That was the way the Germans could salvage

an element of self-esteem out of their predicament,

was to deny these ships to the Allies.

400,000 tons of finest German steel going down.

The main Royal Navy guard fleet

rushed back to Scapa as the ships slipped under the waters.

Claude Choules was on board HMS Revenge.

We were rushing into Scapa Flow,

we could see the German ships, some of them had sunk

and others were going over and sinking.

We could see ships going all over the place.

And we said, "Well, thank Christ for that.

We've been up here nearly six months

waiting for our war service leave.

Now, we'll go home and get our service leave.

The bastards are gone!"

The sinking of one of the world's

most powerful dreadnought fleets was and remains

the greatest loss of ships in one day.

100 years on from that midsummer's day,

moving commemorations have been taking place

in Orkney to mark the event.

This has been one of the most unusual memorial events,

marking what's thought to have been

the only occasion in history in which a navy

destroyed its own fleet, and in little over three hours.

When I was there on the centenary of the scuttling

of the High Seas Fleet,

I felt grief, regret about the waste of so many fine ships

and also so many fine men in a war that certainly

was one of the most useless wars in European history.

Not only had World War I

been a tragic waste of human life,

the dreadnought arms race

had also been cripplingly expensive

for all countries involved.

But that didn't stop the rush to build more of them.

Dreadnought battleships are still the currency

by which nations measure their power and their prestige.

They are the nuclear weapons of their day.

They determine the most important nations.

Smaller nations are desperate

to build one or two dreadnoughts,

just to show that they can have a seat at the top table.

The Washington Naval Treaty of 1921 to 1922

between Britain, France, Italy, America,

and Japan, greatly reduced the size and number

of battleships built in the coming years.

Many famous dreadnoughts were also scrapped.

HMS Dreadnought, the ship whose name had become

a by word for the ultimate battleship,

had been unceremoniously scrapped a year later.

But Iron Duke survived, staying in service another 20 years.

However, there was one dreadnought

whose story had only just begun.

I think Texas is the world's greatest warship.

Not because she fought in the most battles,

but because she symbolizes a lot

of what naval warfare is about.

Texas is here, she's still a touchstone for that history.

And she's the only capital ship left

that was involved in two world wars.

That's significant.

Following the war,

Texas was modernized with radio communication equipment,

radar, anti-aircraft defenses.

She even had her own sea planes.

When World War II broke out,

Texas was still fighting fit and thrown into the fray.

She protected North Atlantic convoys from U-boats,

supported North African landings,

before being called up to help out on June 6th, 1944.

At D-Day, June 6th, she's right off the coast of Normandy,

providing that gunfire support.

Later on, June 25th, the Allies were taking Cherbourg,

the port town that they needed to,

and she was right off of the shore there,

providing gunfire support

and basically occupying those big

240 millimeter German guns.

So they were in a duel.

She was bracketed over 60 times and hit twice.

One of those shells came in right above us and exploded.

It took out the bridge above us.

Injured a couple of gentlemen in here.

But you can see this armor's up to 12 inches thick here.

And so she could take a round.

She's still able to be effective, still greatly feared.

And so she was basically a decoy

and providing that support and a distraction

while the army was moving in and taking over the port.

With the north coast of France secure,

Texas was sent to the Pacific where she supported

the American troops in the bitter fighting on Iwo Jima

and Okinawa in the dying days of World War II.

Even then, Texas' war wasn't over.

At Los Angeles anxious crowds

await a fleet contingent of their own,

the battleships, Texas and Nevada,

both veterans of two wars and five invasions.

Perhaps the highest note of her career,

she did what the U.S. referred to as "magic carpet rides."

She brought home over 4,200 soldiers, sailors, and marines.

So she went out in a high style.

And for the loved ones who had waited,

nothing can compare with this moment.

USS Texas had survived.

But the great battle fleets of dreadnoughts

would never be seen again.

Next time, the aircraft carrier.

That audacious hybrid of flying and sailing

that changed how war at sea was waged.

These giants have become the most fierce

and conventional weapons ever built.

And the truest measure of a nation's naval strength.